Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

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You are correct that there’s a world of difference between those two accusations.

Specific example: In the car insurance paper, which was covered by Data Colada, there was agreement among all the four authors that Ariely himself was the only person to touch the data. That data (IIRC) was completely fabricated.

I’m happy to edit this comment and my original one if those details are wrong. I’ll give Ariely a presumption of innocence which he does not deserve and indeed which I suspect he abuses in research integrity investigations.

(Edit) data colada link: http://datacolada.org/98

At the end under “replies” Dan says himself that he was the person in touch with the insurer. It really beggars belief to imagine that there was someone at the insurer who fabricated a dataset which perfectly tells the BS story of this paper.

Also note that another of the four authors (Gino) will soon be fired from HBS for fabricating data in a series of studies.

>First, it is visually and statistically (p=.84) indistinguishable from a uniform distribution ranging from 0 miles to 50,000 miles [5]. Think about what that means. Between Time 1 and Time 2, just as many people drove 40,000 miles as drove 20,000 as drove 10,000 as drove 1,000 as drove 500 miles, etc. [6]. This is not what real data look like, and we can’t think of a plausible benign explanation for it.

It is just remarkable to see how people with enough knowledge of datascience to perpetrate this fraud for so long would also make errors as rudimentary as producing a faked 'random' data set in a uniform distribution. And with zero cars reporting over 50k miles driven. (edit: and so many others...this is worth reading just to see it all, thanks for linking).

These frauds really are not as smart as they think they are. But I guess selling best-selling books about stuff you made up could make you believe you're a genius.

The downfall of Hwang Woo-Suk, the infamous stem cell con artist, started when a whistleblower posted that two photos of stems cells that were supposed to be at different stages were actually cropped from a single photo. You could match them by dragging them in photoshop.

You would imagine a con artist of his caliber would be more careful than that, but still ...

> You would imagine a con artist of his caliber would be more careful than that, but still

They've been doing it for a long time and it's always worked, either because they've always been this sloppy but everyone else reviewing was sloppier or gave the benefit of the doubt for reasons, or that they've put less and less effort into it over time because it hasn't been necessary.

Also the simpler the fraud is in execution the more likely you might be able to explain it away as a simple mistake or lack of familiarity with certain "tradesperson" tools adjacent to the skills you have framed in latin blackletter on sheepskin.

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