Harvard concluded that a dishonesty expert committed misconduct
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
It's all incredibly depressing. I really feel for all the junior researchers who end up wasting their time, and often derailing their careers because they followed a path based on other people's academic fraud.
Even once you are over that hump you will have quite a few years going from one short-term grant to another, with your ability to get funding being dependent on your previous work. If that has been stymied because you were basing it off dodgy research of other people it could take a long time to build up the kind of record where you get to diversify and some any kind of academic security of freedom.
That said, putting all your eggs in one basket is often necessary to get anywhere with that basket of research.
No, the better approach here is to just shift the incentives. Start funding replication. Once we see labs and career paths that specialize in replication / knowledge consolidation, the whole system will shift for the better. Bibliometrics and hiring committees will start to pay attention and then exploratory researchers will start to pay attention and the system will start to work a little bit better.
Obviously that doesn't apply in setting like drug development where standards do exist, as defined by the best currently available treatments. But if someone is working on something like psychological studies where replicability is the exception rather than the rule, or on exotic tech where only one experimental facility might exist, or on substances or effects that exist only under weird conditions, it's not always that easy (or that safe) to accuse them of lying. Even when you're pretty sure they are.
And there are plenty of fields where you have different interpretations of the same data (see the entire field of economics, also plenty in physics and other fields). Should the people who espoused ether theory be sued for fraud? It'll be a huge mess because doing research is by definition doing something unprecedented.
But there's also the old and established parts, like statistics, parts of the experimental setup, methodology, reporting data accurately (or at all). This is plenty enough to have objective standards for.
A lot of fraud is not in making up experimental results, but instead misreporting the data and drawing unsupported conclusions.
I suspect educational institutions don't want to be seen as organizations that sue their own researchers. Same with paper publishers. And same for grant issuers.
Downstream researchers? Do they have the time, the money? ability to show direct damages whose recompense would be worth all the effort?
Students affected perhaps could, but only if the effect was very direct and they had the resources. And desire to be known as someone who sues their professor.
The damage is usually so diffuse. There is no one party with all the reasons to sue.
I have no idea what the process would be for criminal prosecution, but the diffuse impact may be an inhibitory factor there too.
I’m not convinced this fixes anything. Even when a result is genuine, it’s very easy to fail to replicate it. We all know this from software development: it’s a lot easier to say “couldn’t reproduce” about a genuine bug than it is to track down the precise context in which the bug actually manifests. So if you get rewarded for failing to replicate a result, all the fraudsters will do that. If you get funded only when you actually replicate the result, the fraudsters will pretend to replicate the result.
To the extent that is true, then it is itself evidence supporting the proposition that not-yet-replicated results should be regarded as provisional.
So reward either? This seems pretty obvious.
A bigger issue is that... 3-sigmas is really a weak signal in a high cardinality state-space, which is basically everything above physics of small numbers of elementary particles, and it is the elementary physicists that go for higher. This is what is feeding the replication crisis: Weak signals from very poorly sampled studies.
The meta issue is that we as a society need to start accepting that some things will take longer and require more investment to achieve results. Do fewer studies per unit grant, but do the three-sigma ones only to justify a real experiment/study, not as an acceptance criteria for "discovery!".
I'm not even going to touch politicalization, since I really have no idea what to do about it without a worse cure than the disease.
If a study claims to prove something, it should be repeatedly provable or it's a) fraud or b) not proven solidly enough.
I think replication is a key component of a functional research.
Yes!
> Start funding replication
No :( That won't solve the problem, it'd just change shape. Funding people who produce fraudulent or incompetent papers won't stop being a problem if you ask them to produce a slightly different kind of paper. You just get fraudulent replications, fraudulent claims of failure to replicate, fraudulent rebuttals to claims of failure to replicate and so on.
The other thing this would do is sharply shift the distribution of papers towards those that are guaranteed to replicate, either because they prove things that are trivially true or because they prove things about simulated worlds that may or may not be connected to reality. Both categories of paper are already way too popular, nobody needs more.
Unfortunately, the incentives fix for this problem is so blindly simple it's also difficult to bring up in polite company, because lots of people have an allergic reaction to the implications. Look at places where science is being done at scale without replication crises or widespread fraud, and notice what's different about the incentives. Then ensure science is always done with those incentives.
https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Talent-Pays-Break-Rules/dp/0062...
[YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PeteJudo1 , https://www.petejudo.com/]
Also: DataColada blog [https://datacolada.org/], who made public the misconduct reported by Gino's graduate student.
What amazes me is how simple was the fraud (or at least the ones reported by Pete!). They basically just opened an excel file, started from the top, changed some random numbers, until they reached the effect they aimed for!!! Really? What about those that can do more sophisticated data manipulation?
They win. They are rewarded with the power to control governments and whole populations, they are feted by the media and they accumulate an army of staunch defenders who Believe The Science. When the true believers find their way onto juries or into the courts, they are able to destroy their opponents lives (see the recent case of Mann vs Steyn, which will certainly be very encouraging and helpful for Gino in her quest to bankrupt her critics).
The biggest factor impacting the outcome of an experiment in psych is what the researcher conducting the study wants to be true. The whole subject is broken down in this article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...
This is a characterization that you have just made, not one that the person you are replying to made. They were very clear: "The biggest factor impacting the outcome of an experiment in psych is what the researcher conducting the study wants to be true."
Even to say something is "more pseudo than science" almost directly contradicts your characterization, because it implies that there is both science and pseudoscience.
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is - https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psych...
This whole debacle matters a lot socially: careers ruined, reputations in tatters, lawsuits flying. But strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much scientifically. That is, our understanding of psychology remains unchanged ...
That might sound like a dunk on Gino and Ariely, or like a claim about how experimental psychology is wonderfully robust. It is, unfortunately, neither. It is actually a terrifying fact that you can reveal whole swaths of a scientific field to be fraudulent and it doesn't make a difference.
---
Also interestingly the author apparently studied under Dan Gilbert at Harvard, so he's an "insider". I remember >10 years ago seeing the "happiness science" from Gilbert go around:
https://blog.ted.com/ten-years-later-dan-gilbert-on-life-aft...
Although I actually think the core insight is a good one, and a memorable one -- people are unable to predict what makes them happy. They think they will be happy if they buy a new car to show off, but if you ask them afterward, that didn't really happen.
There was another one of these "TED memes" that turned out to be widely mocked / unreplicable:
When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy
As a young social psychologist, she played by the rules and won big: an influential study, a viral TED talk, a prestigious job at Harvard. Then, suddenly, the rules changed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolut...
For instance, controversies surrounding the PACE trial, which explored treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), illustrate the profound implications of research integrity. Critics have condemned the trial as "biased and profoundly flawed," arguing that its deficiencies have led to detrimental effects on patients' lives and treatment approaches. This controversy underscores the significance of research outcomes.
For more insights into the academic dishonesty surrounding ME/CFS and its consequences on patients I recommended this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/12/chroni...
This issue highlights why it's crucial for both the scientific community and the public to demand rigor and transparency in research, especially when the well-being of vulnerable populations is at stake.
In general, this kind of thing is oddly common. It's all over government forms. I just interviewed with a Chinese father who wanted me to spend time with his children providing exposure to English. He asked me whether I had a criminal record.
I don't, but if I did, and I chose to lie about it, random Chinese parents would never know the difference. (Though entering China might have been a challenge.) Why ask?
I think you'd be surprised how many people are really bad at lying; or even bad at acting normal when they think they have something to hide, particularly when asked such a question unexpectedly. Sure, some people with a criminal record may be able to lie plausibly when put on the spot, but there are a reasonable number who would give themselves away even if denying it. No real cost, some benefit, so why not ask?
So the element of getting suddenly put on the spot doesn't really apply. That's already about as awkward as communication gets.
More importantly, though, I don't think the point is correct to begin with. This is fine:
> I think you'd be surprised how many people are really bad at lying; or even bad at acting normal when they think they have something to hide, particularly when asked such a question unexpectedly.
But job applicants with criminal records are only going to match this description once or twice. For the rest of their lives, it's not going to be an unexpected question, and they'll have lots of practice in denying their record if that's the way they choose to go. You're just never going to catch anyone out this way.
You're right, you're only going to catch people out if you're the only one asking this kind of question... but right now that's more or less true of the people in your story. First-mover advantage. :-)
Because it boils down what could have started as a nebulous mix of halfway-unethical actions into a single fraudulent act that can be pointed to and punished later, and will provide a lot of people with the impetus to back out of the fraud once they see themselves about to commit an unambiguously illegal act.
First, you fill them out after the data has been collected, analyzed, and written up. It's perhaps helpful as a reminder to include a few tidbits in the text (e.g., the ethics approval #), but literally no one is going to fill this form out, realize the sample size is way too small, and....abandon the manuscript.
Second, you don't actually want people to comply with the instructions. For example, it asks for "A description of any assumptions or corrections, such as tests of normality". A decent number of statisticians argue that you shouldn't be using normality tests to choose between parametric and non-parametric stats. On top of that, nobody actually writes out assumptions behind OLS in their paper either.
I am deeply skeptical that this cookie-cutter stuff actually helps in any meaningful way. It feels like rigor-theatre instead.
[1] See e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39703638 from yesterday
But a priori, you'd expect someone studying honesty* to personally care about honesty, and thus to be less likely to give in to these sorts of pressures. That's the thing that needs to be explained; the "man bites dog" aspect.
* EDIT s/honestly/honesty/g;
I'm not so sure you can automatically assume this. You can definitely assume that the subject interests them.
But it's also possible that someone studying honesty/dishonesty might start seeing the subject in academic/technical terms instead of moral terms. Which may give them much less of a disincentive to be dishonest than the average person.
Which is to say that repeated studying and analysis of instances where people are dishonest may break down the gut reaction people have to being dishonest.
You give an alternate explanation, but it's still an explanation; one which wouldn't be needed (and indeed wouldn't apply) to a chemistry researcher.
A variation on your explanation might be: Dishonesty researchers discover just how easy it is for dishonest people to cheat the system, and how little consequence there is, and so is more tempted to be dishonest.
But then, why study honesty if you already know what it is?
For me, this sort of thing - an honesty expert - is in the same realm as 'ethics panels'.
These folk are there to abuse edge case arguments (think "trolley problem") in order to provide moral cover for corporations to act dishonestly, unethically. And they will provide documentation in support. CEOs will just do what they wanted, but call it "moral" tm.
People using their skills dishonestly is the theme of the story
The headline is just making fun of theory and practice. If some is a murder expert, is that some one who understands murder or someone highly qualified to kill people?
Therefore, the title is about a "dishonesty expert" matching the practice, not about a "honesty expert", which could be replaced by any other field.
Surely not marketing and sales!
Chances of being caught are close to zero (I have contacted many times authors of papers who's work I was unable to replicate - most of the time zero reply, sometimes "yeah it was a honest mistake, oops"), super high competition (only a few tenured positions in all world's high visibility institutions per year), full control over student's future and being able to force them to do fraud (and later blame on them).
Obviously, not all, blah blah - but many academic scientists are the last people that should be doing science.
Sure, it's easy for us to think "I would never do anything like that, no matter what others around me are doing". But as someone who has lived in multiple countries, trust me - the vast majority of the things we do are simply a reflection of what we see other people doing.
People who go into psychology are more interested in what's going on in other people's heads and more importantly manipulating other people. It's more about controlling others than controlling oneself. It's why psychology was founded in the first place.
> people who lack a native impulse to be honest / ethical and are curious about people who do.
Ethics isn't about studying people. It's about studying principles. IE what does ethics mean. What makes an act ethical vs non-ethical. So on. You can delve into the ethics of gods, god, AI or even animals. Are ethical principles universal or not. So on and so forth.
What are you referring to here? Which specific founder(s) wanted to (or did) manipulate people?
The job has often been to come up with a marketable theory; to design experiments and write papers to imply that that theory is true without quite proving it; and to avoid the possibility, through any means, that someone will weaken or disprove the theory.
On the counterpoint, I do support basic research and curiosity, which I fundamentally believe has value to societies, but the research being done is hardly out of curiosity. Instead, these perverse incentives have led to an environment where basic curiosity is paradoxically discouraged.
The end result is that large portions of academia are filled with useless machines doing useless work. As a result, we're getting these pathological cases. And we can think about this fraud on one more level: don't think that it will necessarily hurt academia....a fraud is necessary every once in a while so that everyone else shines just a little brighter.
By "usefulness to people" do you mean, essentially, "good for society"? Because I have a hard time believing that funding entities are simply flushing money down the toilet. They must find the research useful to their ends.
Of course, there are benefits to those outside of science: science furthers the growth of technology, but is that really beneficial to us? Yes, we are thrown a bone now and then that is useful such as a vaccine here and there, but the the benefits that actually make life better probably account for 1% of scientific activity these days.
¹ To be determined :)
"In or before 2020, a graduate student named Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it"
"CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms"
"Harvard concluded that a dishonesty expert committed misconduct"
And depending on the general mood I'm in this is kinda a downer sometimes, like apparently only assholes make it in this world because you cannot compete with others if you have a conscience and they don't. Sorry for this tangent but it's just one of these days somehow.
The McDonald's outage at least was good for a quick laugh when I read the "unexpected world's health day" comment.
This is self evidently true, though. A conscience is a constraint on behavior. People without this constraint can accomplish more things. Of course, they may end up suffering for their actions, but it's a surefire way to short-term success, and not unlikely to lead to long-term success as well.
I absolutely disagree.
Conscience, empathy, shame and similar emotions/instincts that encourage pro-social behavior would only have developed if it lead to higher reproductive fitness for those who had them compared to those who didn't.
For instance, only a very small percentage of people are psychopaths. If we look at the average life outcome for psychopaths, we discover that while some of them may be super-successful, we also find a lot of them as social outcasts or in prison. And if they live in areas like law enforcements, they're also more likely to get killed.
I would say the reason should be obvious. People without these guardrails on behavior may get away with anti-social behavior for a time, but eventually people figure them out. This leads to all sorts of active and passive punishment, ranging from difficulty making friends or holding on to a job all the way to life in prison or execution.
SOME people may negate the downsides by acting in a super-rational way. But this only works for people who are both highly intelligent and who also have very good impulse control.
But for most people, having at least moderate levels of pro-social instincts/emotions will be just as beneficial for themselves as for the people around them.
There are certainly environments where anti-social behavior can be optimal. But there are also a LOT of environments where pro-social environments are rewarded. Includig, but not restricted to, within families.
Anyway, you're right that we're not living in our ancestral environment. But I don't think we're in a world that actually rewards anti-social behavior less (EDIT) than much of our evolutionary history.
Rather, I think cynical outlooks like that of the OP actually appears for reasons such as:
1) People who are themselves anti-social who either actually think that everyone else are the same, or at least try to normalize such tendencies.
2) People who, during early development, had a very naîve world view and then when faced with reality, became so disillusioned that they went to the other extreme.
I think the vast majority of people on earth today still live in environments where some amount of compassion, conscience and empathy are useful traits (for themselves).
However, in a lot of cases, it can also be useful to have the ability to turn such emotions on or off depending on the context. Once we start to think of some other group of people (or individuals) as either a mortal enemy or a kind of prey, a lot of us can reach such an off-switch when dealing with them.
It's a classic prisoners dilemma. In aggregate, the best option is cooperation. For an individual, the best option is betrayal in a society where everyone else follows the rules.
Betrayers can't become dominant because the worst option for both the individual and society is everyone being a betrayer. It ruins social cohesion, so there's no synergies to reap rewards from.
Well, this applies to prisoner's dilemma games if you know exactly how many times you will "play" the game with a given other player, including the case where you will only play one time.
But for repeated prisoner's dilemma games, where you don't know what games is the last against a given player, a tit-for-tat strategy massively dominates an always-defect strategy.
Humans have evolved in environments where repeated prisoner's dilemma situation is common, and have evolved emotions such as empathy and consciousness for interactions with cooperative agents.
We ALSO have evolved (to a lesser or greater degree) the ability to turn such emotions off when dealing with people who attempt the always-defect strategy (such as psycopaths).
In fact, psychpathic behavior only becomes viable in populations that have been using tit-for-tat for so long that they've "forgotten" how to punish defectors (ie almost all agents switched to always-cooperate).
But once you introduce a few always-defect agents into the population, the tit-for-tat agents will soon dominate again.
At least for the brain wireing for interacting with members of our own "tribe". When dealing with people outside our "tribe", it's much more likely that we will only play them once, and in such cases, always-defect may indeed dominate.
However, there is also a tribe-level game, where the tribe can act as agents. And in tribe-vs-tribe games, depending on circumstances, both tit-for-tat and always-defect can be optimal strategies. Always-defect can, ultimately, lead to genocide, while tit-for-tat can lead to alliances, trade and intermarriage.
People who think that always-defect is always the optimal mode of behavior tend to be people who either don't consider it for their close relations, or who have very few close relations. For instance, someone who lives alone in the city and is either unemployed or tend to have purely transactional work relations.
What such people tend to forget, is that there is an artificial presence in the city, called the police, that can impose a level of safety that can remove the need for high trust, pro-socal relationships. In a society with police, all you have to do is to know what behavior lands you in prison, and otherwise you can be a selfish bastard.
As soon as you remove the police, loners like that are free game for "predators", and only those who have a "tribe" have any kind of protection. Such a "tribe" can be a clan in an Afghan mountain area or it can be a gang in a high-crime city. While a gang member may have little to no empathy or conscience when dealing with outsiders, maintaining good relations with other clan members can be critical (Depending on what specific gang it is.)
> But for repeated prisoner's dilemma games, where you don't know what games is the last against a given player, a tit-for-tat strategy massively dominates an always-defect strategy.
If we're considering repeated prisoner's dilemma games, you also have to consider the gain/loss of power between the various players. The classic prisoner's dilemma consists of two equally impotent players. Over a series of games, a player could aggregate enough power to change the nature of the game. They could aggregate enough power/resources to alter the parameters of the game, like using those resources to offer a substantial reward for cooperating with them or confessing. Inversely, they could use that power to enforce penalties on other players for betraying them.
The question then becomes whether an always-defect player can accumulate enough resources to change the rules of the game before the other players switch to tit-for-tat.
The answer in the real world appears to be "mostly yes". Uber appears to have chosen "always defect", but they got enough power through their defections that we've become effectively powerless to penalize them for defecting. Theranos is a counter-example where they were eventually punished, though they made the mistake of playing the prisoner's dilemma against already powerful players.
Without getting too political, Trump has a history of defecting on business relationships and the man was elected president.
> At least for the brain wireing for interacting with members of our own "tribe". When dealing with people outside our "tribe", it's much more likely that we will only play them once, and in such cases, always-defect may indeed dominate.
Within the tribe, the power levels tend to be flatter, though, making it easier for an always defect player to seize enough power to not have to play the game anymore. I.e. if the player can become moderately wealthy, the resources they offer their tribe would likely outweigh their history of defection. Company towns are an example of this; virtually all the residents agreed the company was awful, and yet they stayed (for a long while).
> As soon as you remove the police, loners like that are free game for "predators", and only those who have a "tribe" have any kind of protection. Such a "tribe" can be a clan in an Afghan mountain area or it can be a gang in a high-crime city. While a gang member may have little to no empathy or conscience when dealing with outsiders, maintaining good relations with other clan members can be critical (Depending on what specific gang it is.)
Sure, but that's not the prisoner's dilemma anymore, so always-defect is probably not an optimal choice.
A crux of the prisoner's dilemma is that a player can benefit by choosing to defect when the other player chooses to cooperate. If cooperating results in the best individual outcome and the best societal outcome, it's not a dilemma anymore. Cooperating is the obvious best choice.
This is part of what makes always-defect viable. Most situations do not mirror the prisoner's dilemma, and cooperating is often the best individual outcome. If you look at an always-defect player, they might be cooperative in 9/10 or 99/100 situations because only 1/10 or 1/100 were prisoner's dilemmas where they could benefit by defecting.
I don't think "always defect" is globally optimal, only for prisoner's dilemmas. Always-defect globally implies doing so even when it is clearly a sub-optimal choice (like driving your car into a brick wall just because the police said not to). The parameters of the dilemma scope it to only situations where defecting confers gain.
First I disagree that "success" is to be considered only in terms of accumulating material goods. It's also not JUST about feeling fulfilled and loved.
Second, I'm not denying that people are sometimes involved in "games" where always defect is indeed optimal. My objection is to the claim that always defect is universally optimal, even if you narrow "success" down to just maximizing wealth.
And, as I stated above, even prisoner's dilemma games tend to have tit-for-tat as the dominant strategy, since most games are repeated an unknown number of times.
That being said, there is an important element of competitiveness in capitalism. When you negotiate your salary (or that of your employees), you and the counterparty have conflicting interests. If you're naîve when playing the capitalism "game", you're likely to be taken advantage of.
I don't consider this a "defect" situation though, and definitely not a prisoner's dilemma "game". Capitalism tends to be a positive-sum game. This positive sum comes from a side effect of a free market, namely that supply and demand (including for labor) acts as a kind of computation algorithm that generally leads to more efficient than any organization is able plan using a top-down approach.
Imposing always-cooperate into capitalism (such as through labor union negotiated wages) may actually REDUCE this positive sum.
And if there is a game where the sum increases if at least one side defects, then it's not a prisoner's dilemma game at all.
> If you look at an always-defect player, they might be cooperative in 9/10 or 99/100 situations because only 1/10 or 1/100 were prisoner's dilemmas where they could benefit by defecting.
If 1/100 "games" are single-play prisoner's dilemma games, then we shouldn't be surprised if many chose to defect in those specific games. That actually doesn't bother me. Those people who defect in those games, but are cooperative 99% of the time are still probably behaving better than what I generally expect from people.
If you expect people to NEVER defect, then you may want to adjust your expectations. Basically such an expectation is the very essence of being naîve, and will act as a magnet on people who regularly take advantage of other people.
I think this is why it is very important with communities: so that your interactions with other people are mostly with the same people instead of mostly strangers.
The other important aspect is that people thinks "we have the same values, so we are the same team", as you will otherwise always select to deflect due to mistrust of the other part.
Police on its own is not enough, they cannot solve most crimes without help from citizens. A police officier without good informers is not good police ("The Wire", see IMDB). So police is only really effective in a high trust, pro-socal relationships society.
I think you mean "this is intuitively true" because, like so many intuitive conclusions, it is wrong. Looking at animal behavior, it's intuitively true that organisms will only win if they are selfish, and yet selfless behavior has evolved in countless species. Another intuitive truth is that when you have a powerful species of predator that can kill prey at will, that they will decimate the prey population and end up dying off from lack of food. Yet most ecosystems can and do support both predators and prey in equilibrium. In business, it's intuitively true that it would be stupid to make another fast-food hamburger business in the presence of McDonalds - yet Carl's Junior/Hardees did very well doing just that. Counter-examples abound to the intuitive conclusion.
One of the best habits you can form is the habit of questioning your intuition.
We are surrounded by psychopaths. We have politicians willing to sell out to foreign countries for what isn't even massive wealth. We have government workers "working from home" on side gigs on government contracts[1]. And these are examples of "nice" ones that don't involve wars. It's crazy.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-senator-robert-menen...
[1]https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/auditor-general-fired...
I think this is the key fact of life that it took me far too long to realize. They say that "cheaters never win and winners never cheat" but it's actually pretty much the opposite of that.
It explores art forgery, art experts, and the author of a book about art forgery committing a massive forgery.
We should be more concerned when there are NO instances of malpractice reported by institutions. This doesn't mean there isn't malpractice, but that the institution has lost the will to enforce its own rules. Reacting to this news negatively provides a perverse incentive to institutions, and should be quelled.
Absolutely. I recommend everyone to look at her publication history on HBS website:
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=271812&...
Her featured work is a book titled "Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and Life."
One of her most cited paper is "The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest".
I already said this before and I’ll repeat it. Media constantly portraying social sciences and their findings as actual science, is a big culprit of all this disbelief the masses are showing towards real science (the physical and natural sciences).
So let’s not throw the baby out with a bathwater on Science.
I would be interested to see what other peoples comparable list would be for the social sciences – I don’t know enough to say that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence“
I don't think anybody's trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This is entirely serious. But most people have no idea how broad and deep the reach of the hard science integrity problem goes (at least in biology).
Not only that, but it's HARD for people to know, and there are with 100% certainty efforts to keep it that way.
Social Sciences: "The history of the social sciences began in the Age of Enlightenment after 1650" Established: 1650 AD[1]
Physics: 2224 year history
Social Sciences: 374 year history
Physics: 3 incidents of misconduct on Wikipedia article (and that includes engineering as well).
Social Sciences: 11 incidents of misconduct on Wikipedia article.
Physics: One incident per 741 years.
Social Sciences: One incident per 34 years.
One example: I did a pure-chemistry undergrad degree and a psychology-adjacent graduate degree. The "hard science" degree involved basically zero applied statistics of any kind, any statistics concepts that came up were emergent from lower level stuff even in e.g. stat mech courses, and I wasn't even aware that "Design of Experiments" was a thing. Whereas the "soft science" curricula was heavily focused on statistical rigor, DoE, layers upon layers of internal controls, and so forth; basically because there was no practical way to see an unambiguous effect. It certainly seemed "rigorous".
However the soft science stuff just has less predictive power despite the rigor. In broad sense it relates to human perception, capabilities of technology, model systems, semiotics/epistemology (maybe wrong word), prediction/confirmation, especially faith.
For example, at a macro scale on Earth, it is very easy to accurately predict at human scale how things work. Micro scale physical objects require a bit more bootstrapping. You can't see most molecules or atoms, so you have to come up with a way of inferring measurements through other processes which themselves have to be trustworthy. Etc.
At some point of course, one has to select some model as an axiom or matter of faith to make any progress. You can't model a dropping brick if you can't trust your timer or measuring tape, etc. So you stand on giants' shoulders and make a predictive model as an extension of the axiomatic one.
This starts getting really squishy when you're dealing with entire concepts that have no agreed upon definition whether quantitative or qualitative and try to make them into something onto which statistical rigor can be applied!!!!!
So with soft-science literature it is always extremely important to mentally substitute the details of a model's implementation, for the shorthand expression used to describe it which may overlap with a commonly used word.
For example, "We found that this drug candidate significantly reduced depression in mice" -> "We found that this drug candidate significantly increased the amount of time mice swim around before giving up when you chuck them into a tank of water, etc.
because the rigorous conclusion might not actually be practically meaningful if the axioms are practically unpredictive.
And even worse, going back to the "no agreed definition" thing, the definitions of psychological concepts are only defined in terms of these very vague experiments! It's like bootstrapping physics if you're a disembodied nothing in a simulation.
idk there's much more to say on this but I'm procrastinating at work so
Social sciences get to lay claim to CBT?
BTW, social sciences get credit for the modern economy and for the known history of humankind, for modern farming, for today’s government and policy, for mental health and mental therapies, for modern advertising, for understanding of languages, and for modern corporate management, just to name a few.
An example would be something like chemistry. An experiment could be burning hydrogen with oxygen to see if it yielded water. There is a very strong sense in which anybody could do this same exact experiment. It is repeatable by anybody, it happens in an objective space we can all observe.
Now, take something like history (perhaps one of the social sciences). It's proverbial that history repeats itself, but can you do experiments in history? Not really, because you can't do something like rerun WWII, only this time the nazi's didn't chase out Einstein.
Note, this doesn't mean that History is bogus. Yes, it takes as its object of study something which you can't perform experiments on, but nevertheless, it does have other methods which are apropos to its subject matter, and it is a discipline--doing history is scholarship. It yields knowledge--just not scientific knowledge in the sense of the Baconian scientific method.
Economics is the same--we can't just re-run the Reagan era, only this time without trickle-down economics. If somebody is studying, say, the causes of the great depression, their subject matter isn't something which you can gain knowledge about using experiments. Doesn't mean you can't get economic knowledge in other ways.
So....what about Psychology? Specifically, somebody who studies...deception. Is deception something you gain knowledge about by doing experiments? If you take a group of people and try to deceive them, and study what happens, is that an experiment?
Its not, and for a very interesting reason: the "is-ought" distinction. Experiments can tell you the "is"--what is happening. But they can't tell you the "oughts"--what should be happening. In English, we use two different verb moods to mark the distinction, e.g. "Fred is not lying" vs "Fred should not be lying."
Now, you can perform experiments and observations to determine whether or not Fred is not telling the truth. But lying? Lying has an extra ingredient, the intention to deceive. Intentions are subjective and not observable in the same way that a chemistry experiment is. Very problematic from the standpoint of Baconian science.
But what is completely outside the scope of Baconian science is determining whether a sentence like "Fred should not be lying" is true. If Fred is hiding jews in the basement, should he lie to the stormtroopers at his front door? If he had an affair, but its over and he wants to stay happily married to his wife, should he lie to her if she asked him whether he had an affair?
There are no experiments--in the sense of yielding publicly observable and repeatable results--which will tell you this. Note, this doesn't mean that Psychology is bogus, any more than History is Bogus. It's just Psychology has as its subject matter, some phenomena which are not amenable to experiment. It used to develop methods--like psychoanalysis--which were more apropos to studying its subject matter.
But these days, it seems to be embarrassed about all that, and wants to be a "respectable" science. Instead of Freud theorizing about how childhood trauma affects adult moodiness, they do things like study whether or not prozac helps depression. Studying whether or not a drug can boost serotonin levels in the brain can be investigated scientifically, but in an important sense, it is changing the subject. We're not talking about humans anymore, we are talking about what chemicals do to neuron serotonin re-uptake.
So, what if you are an assistant professor, desperately trying to get some scientific results so you can get tenure? If you try to study something like "deception" scientifically---doing experiments on sophomores--you'll run up against the brute fact that your subject matter can't be studied scientifically. You can call what you are doing "experimenting", but any results you get will not be repeatable.
This is a problem if you are trying to get tenure. Psychology could have just said "hey, we are more like economics and history than we are like chemistry, so lets develop some methods appropriate to investigating our subject matter."
But no. What they did instead was just make up results, on what looks like a phenomenal scale. And its been going so long that we have generations of people who got their Ph.D. from somebody who cheated their way through. And even if they wanted not to cheat---they are competing with their peers who will happily cheat.
The result is sad stories like the OP. It's a vicious circle, a race to the bottom. Honesty is punished, deception is rewarded. The whole field has seriously lost its way. They need to get back to realizing that they are studying a subject matter which needs different methods than experimentation to study.
Financial fraud misappropriates one sum of money. Academic fraud can misappropriate massive amounts of resources when decision makers rely on bullshit ideas
What was the experiment? What happens when you attempt to deceive your RAs, colleagues, and reviewers about the results of the experiment!! After all, she has a Ph.D. in deceit, whaat else is she supposed to be studying?
If and when somebody started to suspect, she could just retrieve the fedex envelope, dated and sealed before the results were submitted to review, as proof that this was just one giant experiment, congratulate everybody that they were doing such a good job at preserving the integrity of the field, etc etc...
Frankly, after reading the school's report, I'm amazed that somebody with a Ph.D. in deceit-ology couldn't come up with a better line about how the data was corrupted. Somebody stole my password? Not even my wife would believe that one if she found compromising chats on my phone--and that without benefit of Ph.D.
Things in the academic world are a little different I see. Strange.