Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty
ft.com
ft.com
The first two of these blog posts are:
> students approached this “Year in School” question in a number of different ways. For example, a junior might have written “junior”, or “2016” or “class of 2016” or “3” (to signify that they are in their third year). All of these responses are reasonable.
> A less reasonable response is “Harvard” [...] Nevertheless, the data file indicates that 20 students did so. Moreover, and adding to the peculiarity, those students’ responses are all within 35 rows (450 through 484) of each other in the posted dataset
In addition, of these 20 very suspicious rows, most were strongly confirming the hypothesis of the authors.
Likewise the first link shows that, in a spreadsheet containing outcomes sorted by treatment group, someone had manually moved rows from the span of rows containing one kind of treatment to a span containing outcomes from a different treatment. These provably manually reordered rows also contained most of the strong evidence for the predicted effect...
> We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade
> We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is my friend, Doctor Kimble…
> It is worth reiterating that to the best of our knowledge, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assisted with the data collection for the studies in this series.
I'm confused; I thought 109 described a paper in which Ariely was the sole person to handle the data. How is this not contradictory?
An earlier Data Colada post -- https://datacolada.org/98 -- is about Study 3 in the same article. It seems that Ariely is the only co-author who might have handled the data for that study.
- Dishonesty expert is dishonest
- Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view
- Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys
- Diversity teams are the least diverse
That being said, some work in practical ethics has had a huge impact. Peter Singer's work on animal ethics started the modern animal rights movement, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has inspired many people to donate a lot more to charity than they otherwise would.
Someone can likewise have every intention of being ethical, but just be bad at it. Conversely, someone could know ethics well and simply choose to disregard them and do unethical things anyways. An ethicist isn't necessarily someone who practices ethics particularly well, it's someone who understands the concepts of ethics well.
Is there really any empirical evidence that such people exist and could be helped by an ethics course? I think laymen [to ethics] with a desire to be ethical can generally go about being ethical with little more than the Golden Rule. And if somebody hasn't figured out the Golden Rule yet by the time of their mandatory ethics course in college, there's probably something wrong with them (narcissism? psychopathy? some compulsion that makes them listen to intrusive thoughts?) that will make the ethics lectures basically pointless.
The most effective time to teach ethics is probably Kindergarten, plus or minus a few years. I just don't believe in the existence of adults who want to be ethical but don't know how because a college professor hasn't explained it to them.
Yes. Many, many people (including me) don't speak up when we see someone else doing something wrong. These ethics courses not only drill home the point of the importance of speaking up, but helpfully give many mechanisms in which one can speak up anonymously, or otherwise in a protected manner.
A hypothetical of a situation the GP may have had in mind would be a person who is thinking of fudging or taking a shortcut, but doesn't want anything bad to happen. Ethics courses can show how minor deviations in ethical practice can have major impacts (jokingly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dWjKkF0Zi4 ). These courses can also show that actively stopping work for an ethical reason will not be punished or looked down on in any way. Because of this the person will feel confident in checking their initial impulse to fudge and instead do what's right.
Showing people how they can be ethical is just as important as showing them what ethics are. We don't need to be moral heroes in order to take more ethical action.
And you don't, or shouldn't, need an ethics course to tell you that minor deviations from the plan can have unintended consequences that might have ethical implications. Take taxi drivers for instance, a minor shortcut over a sidewalk could have lethal consequences; do we expect taxi drivers to know this already without having taken an ethics course in college? Of course.
Many people learn early in life that to speak up is to get shut down. This can be combated later in life with good examples and policies.
Incidentally I still have my assigned text from that course, right next to me in fact. "Cyberethics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace" Hmmm...
As you might expect, it's among "one of the most popular" courses offered at Harvard.
Why do people use the term "ethical" as though there were a single agreed-upon "right" system of ethics?
My understanding is that there are numerous concepts of right and wrong, some of which are very divisive.
So i.e. there are people who would be widely detested for being "ethical" in unfashionable frameworks.
All ethics assert a universal ethical framework. Moral relativism just offers a really complicated one.
Except it doesn't. Moral relativism doesn't make any claims about the way one should behave. It's entirely consistent with a moral relativist point of view to oppose commonly accepted morality. Moral relativism merely asserts that there is no absolute arbiter of good and evil, no immutable arc of history towards freedom, no inalienable right. Everything is a matter of opinion and consensus, and consensus is always fluid.
(Of course it wasn't really "all" , either within one community or between communities. People in power were just better about killing the weak people were just better about silencing people who disagreed.)
What studying ethics offers the individual is the tools to analyze their moral beliefs and ensure they are at least internally consistent. That "and why?" is probably the most valuable takeaway from studying ethics. Rather than saying "that act was wrong", a student of ethics can explain, down to axiomatic beliefs, why that wrong. If a disagreement between two people boils down to axiomatic beliefs, then you're never going change each others minds. But a difference in interpretation can be argued with the potential for persuasion.
It also gives you a lot of practice justifying your own actions. Useful, but perhaps not exactly altruistic.
Try the trolley problem. Is it okay to divert a trolley to kill 1 innocent person to save 10? What about 5? What about 1? And this is just an abstract thought problem. Now try war, nukes, abortion, death penalty, etc. Everyone has a simplistic and superficial idea of ethics. An ethics class helps you develop a deeper and broader understanding of ethics. To develop the what and why of ethics.
IME DEI is usually a function rolled into HR (although they often contract with diversity training firms), rather than a separate team, except at large companies. Where there are separate DEI teams, they tend to be the most diverse, at least among the white-collar workforce - the requirements for these jobs tend to be quite nonspecific, because they don't really need to do much besides write stuff and give presentations related to diversity. These tasks can, at a pinch, be mostly handed off to interns and ChatGPT, or else involve cribbing from preexisting presentation templates. The actual engineering, PM, etc., teams tend to be less diverse - graduates of specific university programs tend to be less diverse, in the non-euphemistic sense, than university graduates as a whole.
Yes, otherwise you're saying hiring is just a political test.
It'd be like hiring a reckless loudmouth who loves to make people look bad as your head of PR. Literally the opposite of what you need them to accomplish.
(I also find it suspect that equity or inclusion are "political," but that's another matter.)
And I'm speaking as someone who falls into several ""diverse"" hiring categories. As much as I appreciate the philosophy of DEI work, I personally find most of it pretty toothless. There have even been multiple instances of myself and other rank-and-file coworkers trying to have discussions about bigotry at large (not even in the workplace itself), only to be shut down by those very same DEI coordinators under the guise of "let's use kind words instead of unkind words," because it's not good HR-speak to call a spade a spade.
Like, these are people employeed by huge corporate entities, not radical freedom fighters. A lot of it is just image work to make sure your company doesn't do or say shit that makes you look bad.
I know the type you're referring to—people punchdrunk on their own performative "activism" who love to make everything about themselves—and they're pretty cringey, but at least in my experience they're far from the norm on corporate DEI teams. Honestly super ballsy of her to pull the Diverse White Lady move like that... I'd be shocked if no one else on the team gave her a talking-to, unless (1) she's the boss or (2) everyone else on the diversity team is white.
(Which does happen, and isn't great, but also is pretty funny in juxtaposition with the claims you'll hear about DEI teams being radical Marxist plots or whatever. Half the time these teams are just a bunch of HR managers named Linda who get the letters in LGBT mixed up.)
How do you have these conversations such that you're using unkind words? Are you racially stereotyping people as bigots?
> I'm speaking as someone who falls into several ""diverse"" hiring categories.
Yeah, that makes sense. If your intersectionality was switched those conversation probably would have gotten people fired.
> I have literally never once heard language like that from DEI professionals
Like the "whiteness" thing from the other post. Rules for thee and not for me.
> not good HR-speak to call a spade a spade.
"Although the term has its origins in Greek literature, the subsequent negative connotations with the word 'spade' means that the phrase should be used with caution or not at all." -- Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, Stanford
You might not be held to the same standard as other employees, if you can freely speak in this fashion...
The way you say "suspect" seems like an attempt to sway opinion, which seems like a tacit admission that that the terms are political.
For instance, inclusion of who? What groups do you divide the world's people into such that you need one of every group for proper representation?
> Logistically speaking, it makes zero sense to hire an anti-diversity advocate for a DEI role.
I think most people can do jobs they don't agree with. An engineer can design a bridge that they didn't vote for, an administrator can follow rules they wouldn't have chosen, etc.
> Companies only have DEI teams because they want to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion;
How should you do that though? Is any diversity of thought allowed? For instance, is anyone allowed to think that affirmative action is ultimately harmful and focus on the diversity and inclusion over "equity", and/or argue for what they feel are more helpful methods?
Is DEI defined as a specific set of practices or a general goal of bettering society?
That's not my observation at all.
e.g. Innovation Managers have most likely never done an innovative thing in their life
See also: every freedom fighter that launches a coup to overthrow a dictator, then becomes a dictator themselves within a decade. Or cops that get caught stealing child porn from the evidence locker, despite not being pedophiles by any definition.
Not all these types start this way, or are inherently hypocrites. Repeat exposure to something tends to rub off. You can't rail against the evils of prostitution as the basis of your career without being forced to spend cycles processing what about them is so awful. Thinking about round tits on display, the mechanics of sex, etc. The unthinkable is literally on your mind 24/7, which effectively normalizes the behavior and makes it less outrageous over time. It's a weird cycle of grooming yourself to accept what you purport to hate.
I'm an anti-fraud professional. I'm surrounded by so much of it (seemingly without consequence) that I'm frequently tempted to break bad myself. I never will, but it's a "conscious" decision (as an extremely stubborn Slav) and not because I'm a saint. Temptation just comes with the territory. It wears you down until you fail and make headlines in the most humiliating way.
TL;DR: If you were a public person, watch your actions during bad times.
CGP Grey made great recap in one of his videos [2] called Rules for Rulers.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&feature=share8
Has this happened? He thought it was normal porn?
I haven't heard any new cases of exfiltration in a very long time (at worst, just vice cops soliciting prostitutes) so I like to think the technical/procedural changes are working as intended.
I read some article about some poor cop watching and trying to identify victims for all CSA cases in the country where I live. I wonder if you give such a task to some "psychopath", or atleast I hope so.
I worked in this area (at Harvard as well) a bit as a grad student and can absolutely understand the temptation for the lighter version of this. If you can drop one outlier group, you get a cool story and a job at a top 10 b-school. Or keep it, get a muddled result, and try again for a better paper next year. I ended up just leaving the field entirely as the whole "our system massively rewards dodgy practices" vibe really bummed me out.
I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things.
Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with these issues, but imho (and somewhat counterintuitively), it does so somewhat more honestly.
"academia doesn’t really do this anymore"
I've heard this from more than one current or former academic. Some argue it's due to market logic entering academia. It sounds like you take a different view?
So yeah, I'd say the observation that market logic is entering academia has some surface level reasons to support it.
vs
> Some argue it's due to market logic entering academia.
People's behaviour is shaped by incentives (amongst other things).
People in academia are rewarded for pumping out quirky studies that find interesting things, regardless of whether they reproduce. So that's what you get.
People in business mostly just want to make money selling some gadget (or providing some service). So they need methods that help reliably produce gadgets that are more cheaper or perform better. Because businesses want reliability, you get your reproducibility as a side effect.
(Of course, businesses also produce the occasional study where they use the study itself as marketing material. I expect those studies to be just as unreliable and full of wishful thinking as anything academia pumps out: the incentives aren't any better.)
no intellectual wrangling, just make it rain.
and in my experience, the type-A super-go-hards are respectful enough to stab you in the front instead of in the back.
As someone in academia (very different field than Behavioral psych), I'm very cautious of people who say overgeneralised hyperbole such as:
> I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing.
Because doing science is not clear concise straight forward exercise people envision.
(Science has major systemic issues but that's besides my point)
I assume they said this from a position of naïveté and then after joining academia realized it was incorrect. I'm not sure we should use that to suggest a defect in character.
Apologies for the above poster if this was taken as an attack on their character, it wasn't.
I was heavily encouraged to give high grades for high reviews and to publish high-volume, quality be damned. I hope that my leaving had some effect on the decision makers at my particular institution. But my impression was that the issue was systemic, and I became very bitter. I thought it better to leave than to remain and further institutionalize that bitterness.
However, my main concern is that people enter academia due to some idealistic, romantic and preconceived ideas.
Science (and academia) isn't above the fray of humanities ugly side. It's done by people for people, its messy inefficient monster. I wish it weren't but that means taking the humanity out of it.
These are my crazy ideas. I am probably wrong.
What do you mean by 'anymore'. Was there some golden age of bygone glory?
You either play the game and survive - often at the cost of your integrity. Or you walk. I walked. No regrets.
Then (late 1800s?) it changed to a profession, and the focus became extracting funding from ignorant patrons.
As proof of this most of the open question in fundamental physics are the same ones that were open at the time of Einstein's death.
Compare also how even second rate people could do first rate work in the last fifteen years by applying deep learning to new domains.
You mention that war has a certain tendency to cut through bullshit. Ideally, market competition also does some of that. See https://gwern.net/backstop for a more general exploration:
> I suggest interpreting phenomenon as multi-level nested optimization paradigm: many systems can be usefully described as having two (or more) levels where a slow sample-inefficient but ground-truth ‘outer’ loss such as death, bankruptcy, or reproductive fitness, trains & constrains a fast sample-efficient but possibly misguided ‘inner’ loss which is used by learned mechanisms such as neural networks or linear programming group selection perspective.
Lots of new science to uncover, a lot of which would be basic 100-200 level college courses these days. lotta new things to pioneer. my grandpa did a lot of work with plastics, for example, that are now pretty basic; new stuff then, but now no one thinks about their 0.9 cent plastic lid on their coffee.
lots of mobility but the world wasn't hyper connected, so you could do a trip to somewhere more obscure like Indonesia or Zimbabwe and do research. Now you can just email them the questionnaire.
Years of high schools pushing college now means there are legions of grads, plenty of whom will chase academia. smaller world + growing demand = ruthless academic posturing.
People only care about lines on the CV - and are willing to do anything to add another under the “peer reviewed” column. Including, lie, cheat, and steal (ideas).
However as a PhD student I decided that science academia wasn't for me - not because of out and out fraud - but because I could see success depended on marketing, networking and self-promotion - simply doing excellent quality work was required, but not sufficient.
Some of this is fair - part of an academics job is not just to discover new stuff, but to educate about it's discovery.
Anyway I decided I didn't have a loud enough trumpet and sharp enough elbows.
I'd agree that you find less politics in industry.
This creates a strong incentive to fudge the results and never ship anything. I knew of one scientist who figured out you could just fake the entire thing and skip the work part. He coasted for 5 years doing this.
I think the bigger part of management's fault here is that they should have spent some time on verifying the research before dedicating more resources.
Tons of research, sponsored by pro-choice medical groups
Turns out the rise in maternal deaths preceded cuts in funding.
Speaking to my relatives in Texas, a bunch of ERs shut down around the same time - which could explain the deaths.
Abortion is a hit button issue - family planning is to a lesser degree.
But plain old ERs closing - that’s not political. Just a statistic.
It’s funny how greedy, for-profit companies are strict about honest accounting, while non-profit universities are fine with dodgy research.
Provided that there are valuable things to discover in the field of quirky marketing psychology.
But if all they want to do is provide a regular supply of ammo to both sides of internal corporate conflicts on marketing strategy, and promote the consulting brand of their profs, their current approach is optimal.
I told the person I was working with about the data and suggested it was fraudulent and she became concerned and raised it with her supervisor. Within about 24 hours I no longer had access to the data sets. And the friend of a friend just said that she didn't need help anymore.
I suppose I could have raised a fuss and contacted a journalist but all I had was columns of data without context. Plus at the time I'm ashamed to say I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft and not inclined to do much else that required effort.
Policy always represents somebody's interests. "Data driven" is an excellent cover when you control the data. You get to eat the cake and look good while doing it.
> Dan Ariely was the only author to have had access to the data prior to transmitting it in its fraudulent form
I am curious to know more on this one. Odd to see so much pointing fingers happening. I'm guessing that isn't as rare as I would assume it is?
Certainly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Novak have massive journalistic ethical errors: the former fabricating news for the US Government and the latter blowing a CIA agent's cover (the Plame Affair). Yet, they are celebrated journalists.
It seems that you have to:
- not be hypocritical (it is a greater sin to preach and sin; than simply to sin)
- be younger (established powerhouses can steamroll these accusations)
And to GP: thank you! The number of times Dan Ariely is involved in this data fabrication stuff does make the whole thing seem a bit fishy. At best, he is bad at trusting people, which makes any claims he makes low-coefficient since they could be from data from fabricators.
She was disgraced because she reported inaccurate claims (on WMDs in Iraq) from government intelligence sources. Specifically she reported them without sufficient skepticism — without checking the sourcing of the claims (I.e. asking questions like “how did the CIA acquire this intelligence”) or giving sufficient credence and attention to counter claims.
Although this is considered bad practice, it is not considered fraudulent. She was indeed takling to highly placed government sources and had reason to believe they were credible.
My opinion: Although what she did was rightly viewed, eventually, as journalistic malpractice, she was clearly pleasing her editors who routinely moved her stories to the front page. These editors also failed to demand skepticism and wider investigation, and while at least one was pushed out, the institution of the NY Times remained credulous about government claims. I routinely see stories where they uncritically repeat government claims — especially where classified intelligence is involved and especially relating to military operations. Therefore I believe Miller is also something of a scapegoat.
I was feeling guilty for besmirching Johann Hari's reputation in my own mind until looking at his wiki page and finding the HE TOO was involved in both plagiarism and fabrication scandals like Jonah Lehrer.
Weird. Explains the mental merger I guess.
She is the best-selling author, most recently, of “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life.”
Someone writing a book arguing for breaking the rules is exactly who I would expect to break the rules.
Or is the irony here that someone actually took an idea seriously and followed through on it?
I think the general thesis is questionable, for work especially, because in business contrary to the stereotype being honest and following the rules does pay off in the long run.
This guy's speciality is Applied Dishonesty, so he's not the abstract sort with just theory and no practise. ;)
Does this implicate Ariely or did I read that wrong?
physics has a good reputation, but then you hear of things like apparent fraud in that quantum computing paper about Majorana fermions...
computer science actually seems relatively okay as far as avoiding outright fraud, probably because there's such a strong norm of sharing code. plenty of questionable research practices though.
Public health is in even worse shape. During COVID I was forced to conclude nobody in power was actually reading the papers that were driving policy. They'd regularly have major errors in them, like model code that was full of bugs or where things were stated about the real world as if they were clearly 100% true but the underlying paper stated the models had unrealistic assumptions! (same people making both statements). Universities didn't care about any of this.
I never saw outright fraud in CS but I've seen things that were getting close to the line in cryptography research. Some years ago there were a spate of research papers on Intel SGX that kept claiming they'd broken the security. When examined closely they all used an identical version of GNUtls in the enclaves for their proofs of concept. I got curious about why this specific version of this not very popular cryptography library kept cropping up as the reason for using it never seemed to be mentioned in the papers. Turns out that it's an ancient version, the last version before side channel mitigations were added. The techniques they were claiming broke SGX only worked if you ignored basic cryptographic best practices and used obsolete libraries. And last year there was a non-SGX case where the researchers claimed to be able to extract private keys over the network via side channel attack. The demonstration required the use of a very specific algorithm nobody actually uses, and required the target server to not be doing anything else, and for it to be saturated with traffic that did nothing except invoke this specific obscure algorithm and even then it took days. So this wasn't a realistic scenario anyone needed to worry about but it was presented as if it was.
We saw a widely publicized and long career of false data in biology over the past couple of years following roughly the same structure (just sticking garbage data into excel spreadsheets). Methodological errors and publication bias are also widespread in CS. When I was in grad school, the method I was told to use to choose tools was to choose the second best tool in a paper, since the authors' tool was invariably the best but their evaluations were inherently less likely to transition into my work.
Drawing a further conclusion that whole entire fields of research are simply untrustworthy based on media coverage of bad actors, especially as a nonexpert, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The field that is actually tackling the reproducibility crisis even in a small way is Psychology. This is one reason why there are so many "X doesn't actually replicate" headlines. Yes, replication studies should be even more common. But it is hard to conclude that the social sciences are uniquely horrible when Psychology is actually ahead of the curve here.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/21/ted-talkin...
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/23/its-worse-...
"We understand that Harvard had access to much more information than we did, including, where applicable, the original data collected using Qualtrics survey software. If the fraud was carried out by collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud. (Conversely, if our concerns were misguided, then those files would provide airtight evidence that they were misguided.)"
It does not appear that Harvard found any evidence that they were misguided...
Great example that highlights the balance of presumption of innocence with the asymmetrical bullshit principal. This person should be referred to criminal prosecution for fraud as a deterrent to others. 1,200 page reports to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not scalable.
I suspect most lies are just short term convinces.
What has changed in the past 2000 years is the availability of information. Nothing is 100% true other than defined Universal constants. Everything else is on a spectrum. Those that want to get closer to 100% truth have many tools to get them along. Those that don't care can ask ChatGPT and get something 25% true. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. That's just how people are, and AI isn't really changing that.
this gave us the illusion that we were in a world of Truth, because why would these centralized corporations ever lie to us, or massage the facts in any way? it's The News, of course it's inherently trustworthy.
then the Web came about, causing some to see cracks in the foundations. then the iPhone was released, social media took off, and now the news monoculture is almost (but not quite) dead, and we're back to fending for ourselves in this onslaught of information.
It cracks me up every time an alt media source throws shit at mainstream media for having journalistic standards that are far from perfect but still higher on an absolute level than said alt media. Retraction policies, always asking the accused for comment, citing sources, the list goes on. Unfortunately, it seems that people are more impressed by performative hatred of mainstream media than they are by the exercise of actual journalistic integrity, so I guess things will just get worse until (I have to hope) we figure it out again. Ah well, so it goes.
Nicely put, because it explains the widespread disappointment in journalism, media, academia that don't even seem to try anymore.
(Anyway, what do you mean by "truth"?[0])
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_undefinability_theore...
I agree that one of the problems is that we've sometimes been given reason not to expect an institution to have integrity.
One of the other problems is that public discourse is often lacking in integrity, as well.
On the contrary, I think we should expect them to be dishonest, and they are. They literally have a book named “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”, what did you expect? Of course they're dishonest.
- "That's not how X works." <comment ends with no explanation>
- "Anyone back in ___ who was paying even the slightest attention could have seen that ___ was going to happen."
- "This subreddit / board / field has gone to sh_t"
The story is just entertaining.
/s
To anyone who has worked in research, the various strategies it shows would be tragically familiar.
Seems possible.
In Comments ... Don't be snarky. ... Please don't sneer ... Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.... Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.... Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>
And finally, that would be her expertise.
I was mostly making fun of the language we humans tend to use sometimes: a car expert would be applying their expertise on cars, a botany expert would do it in botany, but it's not an "honesty expert" but a "dishonesty expert"?
I do believe that's an interesting point to make, even if — obviously — at least someone has misread the joke as something else.
Commenting that you didn't read the article, then making a series of shallow and incorrect assumptions about the circumstances ... seems on the nose for shallow, dismissive snark.
Further, it violates HN's prime directive: "What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.
I'm not a mod, but thought I'd address why your comment might be engendering the response it has.
My intent was to highlight an inconsistency in naming a skill with a negative connotation (dishonesty). How can I more explicitly direct the conversation to why is this skill a "dishonesty expertise" (or rather, an "expert on (ethics and) dishonesty")?
I still believe my actual point is "intellectually curious". What other skills are there that are like this? Is there a bad-at-sewing expert who's actually good at sewing?
Four replies deep into this thread, are we discussing topics of intellectual curiosity ... or ... something else?
That itself is a strong indicator of the issue here.
I strongly recommend pg's discussion of comments, particularly about their relationship to kudzu:
(and if you didn't catch that reference, have a look at Prof. Gino's photo.)
"Harvard dishonesty expert dishonestly accused of dishonesty"
> Also, who cares if they did lie
They didn't just lie, they tampered with collected data used for scientific research, harming their co-authors' work and reputation and giving fake leads to their field of study, thus wasting their peers' time spent on reproducing the case. It may also have had an effect on promotions that their peers should have gotten and on the way people got managed, based on these behavioral studies.
Also the evidence collection displayed in another reply is technically interesting.